1. Technical Field
The present disclosure provides a novel application programming interface which defines the protocols to communicate payment related data between a site and a browser for communicating and processing payment information to simplify the purchasing process for users.
2. Introduction
This application addresses a number of issues related to simplifying and managing on-line purchases of products. The first issue relates to the long-felt problem of requiring users to enter in payment data such as credit card information and a user address when making a purchase. Some sites like Amazon.com provide a “one-click” purchasing option but those simplifications are only available in the controlled Amazon.com environment. For all the other merchants, users much inter in their payment data which is cumbersome. Mobile users outside of Amazon.com still need to include and enter in much information which reduces the number of conversions when making purchases on line either on the desktop or mobile devices.
The present disclosure also addresses an issue in the art that arises through the use of buy buttons on disparate platforms. None of this introduction is meant to characterize “prior art” as the present application claims priority to applications discloses various implementations of buy buttons on search engines, social media, and so forth. Thus, none of the discussion in this application should be considered as the applicant admitting any subject matter herein is prior art.
Given the advent of buy buttons available on such sites as google.com, facebook.com, instagram.com, pinterest.com, bing.com, yahoo.com, youtube.com, amazon.com and twitter.com, there is a challenge that arises in terms of tracking purchases. A user may make a purchase of a first product on facebook.com and the next day purchase a second product on google.com. To enable such purchases, the sites like google.com will maintain purchase information like credit card or payment account information, or an interface with PayPal® or Apple Pay will be provided such that purchases can be easily processed. While these buy buttons are expanding, there is no existing mechanism of harmonizing or organizing those purchases such that users can easily manage purchases. The user may forget where they made the purchase and feel frustrated when they cannot manage the purchases or review their purchase history. For closed aggregated merchant sites like www.amazon.com, wherein the purchases are controlled through a single site with multiple merchants making their products available to such a site, the ability to manage the user account and history of purchases is easier.
However, the goal of buy buttons on various sites is the enable purchases in those “micro-moments” when a person might be on facebook or instagram and see something they might want to buy. The benefit of the buy button incorporated into these various traditionally non-merchants sides is to take advantage of the ease of purchasing from sites where people spend time, such as google.com and social media sites. However, as noted above, by presenting the buy options at those locations to take advantage of such micro-moments, makes the follow up management of various purchases more difficult because the purchases are spread across disparate sites that are not coordinated.